The present invention relates generally to storage systems and, more particularly, to system and method for providing a cluster-wide unique identifier (ID) for any given object access control list (ACL) so as to provide a search key to the ACL in the cluster-wide distributed database in a replicated object storage system.
Objects can have Access Control Lists (ACLs) associated with them. For any given ACL, there is a high likelihood that many objects will share the same ACL. To save on storage needed to record ACLs for individual objects, each unique ACL will be stored in a separate cluster-wide distributed database table and each object will need to have an ID for the assigned ACL. This is typical many-to-one database association.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,657,581, the entire content of which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a highly available metadata system in a clustered environment that has a feature of distributing database content into regions (several small databases) to achieve both data distribution and protection. Each region database comprises a self-reliant subset of content metadata with simplistic one-to-one associations between database records, and all related metadata will reside in one region database for a given collection of fixed content. With this organization, it is possible to perform expansion or shrinking of the number of database regions to allow for greater variants in scale of the overall cluster database by performing simple bulk record movement between region databases without having to update internal associations between database records.